With the appearance of smart phones and tablets and the integration of already existing devices, like personal computers, into the communication networks these communication networks are showing continuously increasing data traffic. Users are downloading multimedia data like videos or audio data. On user devices several applications exists that periodically download most recent blog entries, portal news pages or videos for the user to be able to access this content instantly. With the increase of memory space in the end user devices the content will often be downloaded even if the user is currently not interested in consuming the content but on the other hand will consume the content later on.
Some content providers combine different media data, like audio and video data, in contents even if the user will only consume one type of media data, e.g. audio data, separately. This results in a large amount of traffic which is not used by the end user but which might cause high traffic load in the network.
In both 2g/3G and Long Term Evolution (LTE) network there is a standard way for the application server (AS) to request the establishment of a lower-than-best-effort bearer. FIG. 1 shows a schematic overview of a network according to prior art. A user equipment (UE) 10 is connected to a communication network comprising a radio scheduler 11 which is connected to a gateway 12. The gateway 12 comprises a bearer handler 13 which is adapted to select or adjust a bearer for a data transmission over the radio scheduler 11 to the UE 10. An application server 14 provides its service to a UE 10 by sending the related data traffic via the gateway 12 and the radio scheduling entity 11 to the UE 10. The application server 14 is able to send a downgrade request for its traffic to a policy charging and rules function (PCRF) 15. The PCRF 15 can be implemented in any kind of network node The PCRF is the part of the network architecture that aggregates information to and from the network, operational support systems, and other sources in real time, supporting the creation of rules and then automatically making intelligent policy decisions for each subscriber active on the network. After receipt of a downgrade or upgrade request the PCRF 15 sends a rule to the gateway 12 to adapt the bearer handler 13 to select a different bearer for the transport of the traffic from the application server 14 to the UE 10. The application server 14 communicates over the communication network with the UE 10.
The UE 10 is able to communicate via the communication network directly with the application server 14 which provides the service and can order an upgrade or downgrade of a service provision. If a different application server provides another service the UE 10 has to communicate with each specific application server to adapt each specific service provision. The communication network is not involved in the decision for adapting the data traffic between the UE 10 and the application server and is only used as an access pipe between the UE 10 and the application server 14.